City Council OKs new public hearings on sex-crimes unit

The Public Safety Committee will monitor progress as police work to improve handling of assault complaints.

By Mark Fazlollah
and Craig R. McCoy
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

Promising to closely monitor reforms in the police rape squad, City Council yesterday authorized new public hearings into the unit's efforts to correct past mishandling of investigations.

In a unanimous resolution, Council approved hearings by the Public Safety Committee "to monitor the progress made in improving the handling of sexual assault complaints." The resolution also noted that Council previously requested from the police a detailed accounting of cases over the last five years that the rape squad had classified as noncrimes or had deemed "unfounded," the police term for a groundless allegation. About 2,700 cases were to be reviewed.

The Council panel also sought answers to a detailed list of questions about the unit's policies and practices.

Police Commissioner John F. Timoney had said at a Dec. 6 hearing of the Council police oversight panel that, within a few weeks, he would provide an initial breakdown of the cases dating to 1995. That time frame was selected because the statute of limitations on rape is five years.

In an interview yesterday after the Council resolution was adopted, Timoney said he would provide his report "any day now."

The commissioner said he welcomed the continued Council interest in the rape squad, saying he had "no problem with any group monitoring our progress."

The December public hearing on the rape squad was sparked by a series of articles in The Inquirer last fall. The stories detailed how the unit improperly shelved thousands of sexual assault cases since the unit was formed in 1981.

After the articles were published, Timoney ordered department auditors to review the investigatory reports on the 2,700 cases and to cull out those that needed further investigation.

The auditors found that most of the 2,700 had been misclassified and should be newly counted as crimes for official city statistics. They also found that about 2,000 of them needed more work by detectives.

The commissioner has assigned about 45 new detectives to the unit to work through that backlog of cases. They were detailed there as a first assignment upon receiving their detectives' shields.

So far, the detectives have completed work on about 150 of the cases. They have determined that about 60 were buried rapes and that dozens of others were lesser sexual offenses.

Timoney said that the work by the new detectives had started slowly but would speed up as they gained more experience in sex-crimes investigations.

He also said the review has already led to arrests in sexual assault cases and that more are expected soon. He did not elaborate on the arrests, but other officials have said they included at least two men charged with rape.

In one of the January arrests, police charged a Kensington man with raping his 10-year-old stepsister. In the other, a North Philadelphia man was charged with the rape of his 8-year-old brother.

Councilman Angel Ortiz, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, said the unit appeared to be changing for the better.

"We will keep the jurisdiction, and we will monitor them until we are satisfied," he said. "I anticipate that we may have some new hearings to go over what has been accomplished."

The resolution approved yesterday gave Ortiz the authority to hold hearings but did not set any dates.

Timoney said the detectives' review of the old sexual assault cases was "nowhere near finished" and probably would not be done for six months. At that point, he said, the department would provide a follow-up accounting, quantifying precisely what types of crimes had been uncovered by the review and fresh detective work.

"I'm looking to put this thing behind us," Timoney said. "But we're not going to do this stuff piecemeal."